Great Northern Butte Division

Version 1.0 – Great Falls, MT – West Bank of the Missouri A Route for Railworks 3 / Train Simulator 2012

Introduction

The GN Butte Division Route takes you back in time about fifty years, to the city of Great Falls, Montana. On the Great Northern railway, J.J. Hill's proud transcontinental linking Chicago with the Pacific Northwest, Great Falls had become a major hub. Located at the junction of the lines to Havre, Billings, Sweet Grass, Butte and numerous branch lines, it also had a major engine and car repair shops complex, a roundhouse and quite large engine servicing facilties, a large yard and quite a sizable passenger depot too. And let us not forget the many industries the GN served in the Great Falls area, including the huge Anaconda copper smelter just north of town, a refinery right next to it, two flour mills, a meat packing plant, several elevators and stock yards, a large local freight house, and of course the usual team tracks and smaller industrial spurs.

There even was a second railroad in town: as part of its Montana Extension branch, the Milwaukee Road has also connected Great Falls to their network. Although their amount of traffic in town was considerably lower than that of the GN, there are still plenty of scenario opportunities on the "other" railroad in town. Both railroads also interchanged cars in Great Falls.

Route Details

This is version one of this Railworks route. It offers you the almost complete trackwork of the Great Northern and Milwaukee Road in and around the city of Great Falls, modeled based on 1950s track plans of the GN railway. Tracks and siding markers are more or less complete for the whole track network of the route, but scenery, speed limits and signals have only been added to the west bank of the Missouri River. All parts east of the river are still completely empty.

However, the finished part of the route already offers you a wide variety of operational opportunities. Already finished and fully operational are: the big GN yard, the GN shops, the engine servicing facilities, the entire Smelter Line branch including its on-line industries (an elevator, stock yards, the refinery, and of course the big Anaconda copper smelter), and in part the industries and spurs south of the yard.

Signaling

A set of custom signals have been built for this route. The signal models have been created from the signal source files provided to us by RS.com on their developer wiki and have been scripted to simulate a simplified model of actual GN signaling rules. Credits

Marc Nelson of 3DTrains for ScaleRoad Kevin McGowan for his many industrial buildings and objects Tom Moyers for his switch stands James Friedland for his invisible transfer points Michael Sinclair for his conifer trees RailSimulator.com for the signal source files, the many assets of the default game content, the foliage pack and the UK Station pack that were used on this route

Installation

Simply use the package manager in the game's launcher program to install the package file. It comes with all required files except for the the ones by 3DTrains and RS.com.

A simple free-roam scenario is included.

Please make sure that 3DTrain's ScaleRoad and RS.com's UK Station Pack have been installed.

You can get ScaleRoad at www.3dtrains.com. The AP Station Pack is available at http://store.steampowered.com/app/24086

Disclaimer

This is a freeware project, under no circumstances may you charge any money for it. You may redistribute this route - as long as it remains free of any charge. The individual rights of the contributing scenerey authors must be respected! Contact them prior to any further redistribution if in doubt about their wishes regarding the distribution of their files.

Although it is unlikely to happen, I shall not be held responsible for any damage any part of this archive might do to your system. You agree to use the files on your own risk.

Contact

RailWorksAmerica & trainsim.com: GreatNortherner